Sacred Fire

knew it was pointless. He would break; people always broke. He’d seen it many times before. Sometimes it would take a day, even two. Once, a high priest of Morgion had lasted a full week before he lay half-dead and sobbing before the inquisitors-but he bad still answered their questions in the end. The man had died the next day.

Still Cathan fought, though every fiber of his body ached to crumble, to tell them everything they wanted to know. They would break him, but he wouldn’t make it two more. He resisted well, and soon lines of annoyance marked the inquisitors’ stony faces.

“You must tell us what we need to know,” they said.

Cathan spat on the floor.

“Very well,” they said.

A door opened. A figure stepped into the room. He was a tall man, hawk-faced with a shaven head, cloaked completely in red. A large, white eye had been painted on his forehead. Cathan stiffened at the sight of him: He knew at once that the man was an Araifo, and a powerful one at that. He reflexively reached to his chest for the malachite amulet, but it was long gone, taken from him. His mind was open, unguarded. Every single notion in his head lay bare,

The man never said a word, simply looked at him, Cathan pressed his lips together, squeezed his eyes shut, beat his head against the ground, but could not keep out the thought-reader. His stare bored into Cathan; he gazed not just at him but through him. The man’s mind plunged in, pushing through memories and desire fears and regrets, shoving them aside with no effort. There was no pain, though Cathan screamed anyway.

Then it was over. The Araifo’s gaze shifted to the inquisitors. The man shook his head. “He knows nothing important,” he murmured. Then he turned and left.

Cathan lay curled into a ball, whimpering and trembling. The inquisitors regarded him with cold curiosity, like scholars studying an insect

“By order of the Kingpriest, you are Foripon, cast out of the sight of Paladine and the other gods of light,” they informed him. “No one will have you as a slave, and you are too dangerous for the Games, so you will remain here, in our care. Your life will be hard and joyless, but it will be nothing beside what comes after. The Abyss awaits your soul, Cathan Twice-Born.”

He’d passed out then, and awoken back in the black stillness of his cell. And then the dreams came, more vivid than ever, in sleep and waking alike now.

He saw the Lordcity lying like a hoard of jewels on Lake Istar’s northern shore, the air ringing with the sound of voices-thousands of them, raised in prayer, and above them the Kingpriest’s own, calling out from within the crystal dome of the Temple. Calling upon the gods to do his bidding.

The hammer was their answer. It streaked down toward the city, wreathed in flame. The sky above Istar rained fire. The rain fell upon the city, and it burned. The people’s songs turned to shrieks of terror and agony. Cathan watched as walls crumbled, parapets fell, pleasant gardens turned into infernos. Men and women were thrown through the air like broken dolls, ran burning through the streets. The basilica of the Temple burst, flinging shards of crystal into the air. The Lordcity disappeared, utterly destroyed.

The destruction spread, moving across the empire-first the heartland, then the protectorates and provinces. Wave after wave of ruin rippled outward, tearing the land to shreds. Cathan screamed until his throat felt rough as a whetstone, and then his voice splintered and failed him. But no one heard him.

He tried to tell the guards about his dream, those rare times they opened the door. He grabbed at them, babbling about the hammer and the rain of fire and the cracking of the world, but they paid him no heed. The dungeons were full of lunatics, raving that they were Huma Dragonbane resurrected, or foretelling the world’s ending in endlessly imaginative ways. What was one more madman?

“In time, Cathan gave up, and most of the time lay still and silent, even when the guards visited with food. Despair took him. The hammer would fall, and that would be the end. There was nothing left but to wait for death.

“Palado,” he murmured in the dark, over and over, “me paripud.”

Forgive me.

That’s strange, he thought one day. A visitor.

He was lying on his cot, curled up. He was awake but his eyes were closed, so at first he didn’t see the presence within his cell. Still, he felt the unmistakable sense of another, one who wasn’t a guard. There was light, too-a glimmer that showed red through his eyelids-and an odor, one he’d never expected to smell again. It was so strange, it took him a moment to recognize the attar of roses, sweet and heady, so different from the familiar dankness of the dungeon. And, if anything, the air was warmer than before. A frown worked its way onto his face. Was this some new trick of Fistandantilus?

He let his eyelids crack open. The cell was lit as bright as day, by something akin to the steady gold of sunlight. It stung his eyes, making him draw back against the wall and throw up an arm to ward it off. Slowly, his eyes began to adjust. There was… a tall, slender figure, either human or elf. Blinking, he forced himself to focus, to make out features.

His visitor was a woman of middle age, perhaps ten years younger than him. She wore clerical robes, but in a style that had been outdated for decades: white with purple trim, an amethyst circlet on her brow. Her face was kindly, but at the same time cool, like a marble statue. Her iron-gray hair was pulled back into a tight bun. He recognized her immediately, for he had once known her.

“Efisa?” he breathed.

Lady Ilista smiled sadly. “Young Cathan. Only not so young any more, I see.”

Cathan had seen ghosts before. They walked the ruins of Losarcum, sometimes, and the shade of Pradian, a long-dead would-be Kingpriest, had helped him recover the Miceram beneath Govinna. But this was Ilista, once First Daughter of Paladine, and she seemed solid flesh. She looked exactly the same as she had forty years ago, when she had died defending the Lightbringer from a demon. If Cathan hadn’t known better, he would have thought her a living being.

“What is this?” he whispered, lest the guards hear. “Are you returned from the afterworld?”

“Not exactly,” Ilista replied, and shook her head. “Not all of us can cheat death as you did, Twice-Born.”

“Is this … is this the end? Has the god sent you to take me back?”

Her smile disappeared. Her eyes shining, she reached out to touch his cheek. Her hand felt warm and real against his flesh. “Poor man,” she said gently. “The torments you must have known, and to speak of your death with such hope in your voice … but no, Cathan. It is not time. Paladine sent me, but not to claim you. Your part in this is still not played out.”

“I should have known,” he muttered, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice. He looked away from her, his mouth twisting. “What do you want of me, Efisa? There’s nothing I can do, not down here in the dark.”

“So you will not remain here,” she replied. “I will take you from this place, so you may perform one last task before Istar meets its doom.”

Again Cathan saw the burning hammer before him, ablaze as it streaked down upon the Lordcity. “Then it’s true. The end is near?”

Ilista nodded. “The Kingpriest’s hubris has grown too insidious, the people’s idolatry of him too great. The Balance is shifting. Any more, and it will collapse. The gods will not let that happen. If Beldinas continues to ignore the warnings they send, the hammer will fall.”

“But what can I do?” he repeated, his voice cracking. “He won’t listen to me, not after I betrayed him. I cannot stop him!”

“You are not meant to,” she said. “This you must understand: Even if you were to kill the Kingpriest, it would not stop the hammer. Istar must be destroyed.”

He stared at her. She looked back, regarding him with maddening sympathy. He boiled with anger, suddenly. “God’s blood Efisa!” he snapped. “How many thousands of innocents will die because of this? For what?”

“For the world ” she said. Tears broke free, running down her cheeks. “If Beldinas destroys the darkness, light will die with it Krynn needs the Balance to sustain it, or it will fall back into the formlessness of chaos. It nearly